most disinterested love of virtue, this very fact has been sufficient to justify a denial of their Pagan origin, and the assertion that the true source of their inspiration must have been Judæa. Hence the curious struggles of many intelligent men to establish a personal connexion between Paul and Seneca, and to demonstrate that the Ethics of Plutarch are coloured by Christian modes of thought.[100] Other authors of the period who furnish material for correcting this one-sided impression have been less known to the multitude and less consulted by the learned. Even were the worst true that Juvenal, and Tacitus, and Martial, and Suetonius, and Petronius have said about Roman courts and Roman society; even were it not possible to supply a corrective colouring to the picture from the pages of Seneca, and Lucan, and Pliny, and Persius, and even Juvenal himself: yet it should be easy to remember that, just as the Palace of the Cæsars was not the City, so the City was not the Empire. _Exeat aula qui volet esse pius_ is a maxim that could with advantage be applied to the sphere of historical criticism as well as to that of practical Ethics; and if we leave the factions and scandals of the Court and the City under the worst of the Emperors, and follow Dion into the huts of lonely herdsmen on the deserted hills of Eubœa, or linger with Plutarch at some modest gathering of family friends in Athens or the villages of Bœotia, we shall find innumerable examples of that virtue which the Republican poet sarcastically denies to the highest rulers. Even after the long reign of Christianity, vice has been centralized in the great capitals of civilization; and Rome and Alexandria and Antioch are not without their parallels among the cities of Modern Europe. In Alexandria itself, the populace who could listen to discourses like those of Dion must have been endowed with a considerable capacity for virtue; the tone of the orator, indeed, frequently reminds us of those modern preachers who provoke an agreeable sensation of excitement in the minds of their highly respectable audiences, by depicting them as involved in such wickedness as only the most daring of mankind would find courage to perpetrate.[101] We propose to deal elsewhere with the testimony of Plutarch as to the moral character of the age in which he lived, and at present confine our observations to the assertion that his “Ethical” writings are crowded with examples of the purest and most genuine virtue; not such virtue as shows itself on striking and public occasions only, but such also as irradiates the daily life of the common people in their homes and occupations. And although he is, perhaps, in some of his precepts, a little in advance of the general trend of his times, inculcating, in these instances, virtues which, though not unpractised and unknown, are still so far limited in their application that he wishes to draw them from their shy seclusion in some few better homes, and to